If enabled by an admin, you can use CCs and followers to bring internal users (agents and admins) and external users (your customers or end users) into a conversation about a ticket and control who receives ticket notifications by email.
About CCs and followers
- CCs allow you to include end users and agents on ticket notifications. Internal and external users can add CCs (copied users) to tickets. Agents who are added as CCs will have their email addresses visible to all end users in the thread (agents are not copied separately). CCs can respond to ticket notifications publicly, or they can remove the requester from the notification to submit a private response. A ticket can have up to 48 email CCs.
- Followers allow you to include additional internal users (agents or administrators) on ticket notifications. Internal users can add followers to tickets. Followers receive updates on the ticket without exposing their identity to end users. There's no limit to the number of followers you can include on a ticket.
It's important to understand what happens when different users (your end users, agents, CCs, and followers) reply from email. See the following related articles for more information:
About adding CCs to tickets
CCs allow you to copy end users and agents on ticket notifications.
Agents and end users can use the CC line to add external end users to a ticket’s email thread. If the ticket is restricted to certain groups or organizations, agents can use the CC line to add internal agents who are not part of the allowed groups or organizations.
Both internal and external users can add CCs to tickets. Internal users are your company's agents and admins who can view the ticket. They can add CCs from the ticket interface or when replying to ticket notifications by email. External users are your customers or end users and can add CCs when replying to ticket notifications by email.
All copied users can:
- Send and receive public comments to the ticket conversation.
- Add other external users to the conversation via the CC line.
- Be seen by other CCs and followers on the ticket, as their email address is visible in the ticket header. Agents who are added as CCs will have their email addresses visible to all end users in the thread (agents are not copied separately).
- Send private comments to a ticket conversation by removing the requester from the notification.
- Receive and respond to private comments in a ticket conversation if they are explicitly included on that comment.
- Remove themselves or other CCs from the ticket conversation.
About adding followers to tickets
If enabled by an admin, you can use Followers to include additional internal users (agents or admins) on ticket notifications.
If your administrator has enabled Automatically make an agent CC a follower, you can add internal users to tickets as followers from ticket notifications by adding them as a CC. In this case, the internal user becomes both a CC and a follower. See Setting permissions for CCs and followers.
Internal users who can view the ticket can add followers to the ticket. There's no limit to the number of followers you can include on a ticket.
Note that if an agent replies to a ticket notification and they're no longer the requester or assignee on the ticket, they are automatically added as a follower to that ticket.
Followers can:
- Receive public comments and private comments added to the ticket conversation.
- Make private comments and public comments.
- Create a private comment by replying to a private comment and likewise for public comments.
- Remove themselves from the ticket conversation.
- Remain hidden from CC'd end users and other followers on email notifications. Their name and email address don't appear in email notifications sent to other users. For more information about the email notifications that followers receive, see Best practices for using email clients with CCs and followers.
- Access any ticket that they are following, even if they would not normally be allowed to access the ticket.
6 Comments
Thanks - it appears we will need to do this. I think the option to only allow agents to add CCs was there for a good reason and it is a pity to see it has been removed. We would have liked to have used the followers functionality but we cannot afford that loss of control.
Can I ask another question? On enabling 'CCs and followers', agents currently CCd on a ticket are automatically converted to followers. If we rollback, will they be switched back to CCs?
When you 'Opt out of the CCs and Followers experience', as also outlined in the article I shared above:
After a few minutes, refresh your browser and open a few of your tickets to verify that the Follower field in the sidebar has been replaced by a CCs field. Existing ticket Followers will still be present on the ticket as CCs.
So, according to this article, I don't believe it should happen.
Best,
It is not possible to allow only agents to add CCs to tickets. When the Enable CCs option is checked, both agents and end users can add CCs to the email thread. This is a hard-coded restriction as one of the goals of the CCs and followers experience is to make CCs behave more like they do in emails.
If this is a roadblock in your workflow, you can roll back CCs and followers for the old experience.
We used to be able to prevent external users from adding CCs to a ticket. Is that no longer possible?
We've found that allowing CCs to add further CCs can lead to data breaches.
Question regarding CCs and Users.
We have a closed system, where all of our users are registered. If a registered user sends us an email with a CC to a person who is not registered, does the CC automatically become a user in our zendesk?
We disabled CC's to prevent this from happening, in our current application. If this is still the way cc's are handled then we won't be able to migrate to the new application.
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